Debris from the Stone Horse Motel waits to be collected. A fire ripped through the vacant motel early Sunday.

Transients to blame for motel blaze?

By DOUG FRASER

dfraser@capecodonline.com

November 27, 2012 - 2:00 AM

SOUTH HARWICH — Investigators have yet to determine the cause of a suspicious early morning fire that destroyed a large portion of a vacant motel, but neighbors believe it may have been started by someone who broke in seeking refuge on a cold night.

Neighbors said the motel, which sat unoccupied since the current owners bought it at auction in 2009, had been a magnet for transients and the homeless. Coffee cups, an upended mattress blocking a window, a door ajar or open bulkhead were all signs that someone had moved in for a day, or sometimes longer.

"When the weather changed, we saw more people going in," said Mary Kane, who lives a few houses from the Stone Horse Motel. Kane said she called police every other week about the motel being broken into.

"Sure, it was suspicious. The utilities were all turned off. Someone had to light it," said Bob Masbaro, vice president of Stone Horse Shoal LLC, a Chestnut Hill-based company that purchased the motel at auction in 2009. The company paid $1 million for four buildings on 2.6 acres.

Initially the company told the neighborhood it intended to convert the motel into luxury condominiums, Kane said, with price tags of $200,000 to $400,000 per unit. That never came to pass, as Masbaro said the company was busy with properties in the Boston area and market conditions for condominiums on the Cape weren't as favorable.

The company already had decided to sell the Stone Horse Motel, Masbaro said, and had secured a broker last week.

Neighbors initially were cheered in 2009 by the idea of a major fixture in the neighborhood being rehabilitated into a luxury facility. The motel had been on a downhill slide for years before Masbaro's company, also known as The Growth Companies, purchased it. In 2008, neighbors fought successfully against a proposal by the previous owners to turn the motel into a drug- and alcohol-free residential facility. Before that, it had housed seasonal workers. Although Masbaro's company maintained the landscaping, the darkened empty building and lot attracted unwelcome visitors and became a dumping ground for mattresses, discarded furniture and other trash, neighbors said.

Three of the four buildings remain intact, but the largest, a 20-unit, two-story, 124-by-27-foot building assessed at nearly $230,000, was destroyed in the fire.

Jay Booth lives across the street and the flashing lights of fire, police and rescue vehicles woke him at around 1:30 a.m. Sunday. He opened the door to see towering flames pushing large black cinders the size of dinner plates skyward. He woke his downstairs neighbor.

Firefighters from five towns battled the blaze in freezing temperatures. Harwich Deputy Fire Chief Kent Farrenkopf said it took them between a half-hour and an hour to get the fire largely under control, but hours more to chase down pockets of fire.

With the wind howling at 20 to 30 mph out of the west, the fire moved quickly from one end of the motel to the other, Farrenkopf said. Firefighters feared the big cinders could spread the blaze to the surrounding woods and homes. They brought in forestry units to protect the woods to the east of the motel.

"It was a full conflagration, an inferno," Kane said. "The firefighters saved the neighborhood."

The investigation is ongoing, said Farrenkopf, and investigators have not found an accelerant or a point of origin for the blaze. He urged anyone who might have any information on the fire to contact the Harwich Fire Department at 508-430-7541 or the state fire marshal's arson hotline at 1-800-682-9229.